Real People Profiles Mashup

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:30:00 -0500
real-people-profiles

The Real People Profile published yesterday (Faryal Khalid's, featuring the best Real People Profile photo to date) was the 60th to appear on this blog, and in honor of that milestone (or, really, just because I feel like it), I'm going to try something a little different with this post.

Microsoft Word has a feature called "Autosummarize," which assigns a score to each sentence in a document (based on whether it contains words used frequently in the document), then uses the scores to produce a summary. In my experience these "Autosummaries" are actually terrible summaries, but sometimes can produce interesting, almost poetic sequences of ideas.

So I've taken the 60 Real People Profiles published to date, cut and pasted each person's answer to the question 'What's the most important or memorable thing you learned in college/have learned at UMBC?' into a single Microsoft Word document, and "Autosummarized'" it. Here is the result: 4,000 words boiled down to 400 representing, in an odd and very unscientific way, the collected wisdom of the UMBC community.

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I’ve learned not to postpone getting involved or devoting time to that which I find meaningful – as life will never get less busy and the time to act is generally now. I've learned the important skill of being able to listen to, appreciate, and grow from other people's lives.

College is a place where you make life-long friends. College is a time for all of us to learn and grow, and every new thing I've tried has helped me grow as a person. Throughout my time in college, I took service-learning classes that challenged me to take the theory from our texts and apply it to what I was learning through my service. Now, life has come full circle and I am helping to facilitate these service experiences for students here on this campus.

I also learned the importance of friendship by surrounding myself with an insanely talented and beautiful group of people. Time management. Because I am very involved in student life, I have had to learn how to balance my extracurricular activities along with my academics.

College isn't all about studying; it's about learning, learning that takes place both inside and outside of class. During my time at UMBC, I've learned a lot about myself. How to manage time. UMBC, being a relatively smaller institution to say, College Park, it is really easy to get involved in student organizations. There are also many job opportunities available for students, which leads to a very busy nonacademic life here. I’m still in college – hence, still learning! We were pretty much always stressed out about school, life, you name it.

College was an amazing experience for me. By getting involved as an RA, in serving learning projects and volunteering, event planning, church, etc I made life long friends, learned skills that have supplemented that put into practice what I was learning in my sociology and politics classes and broadened by understanding of the city and indeed the world.

UMBC is an incredible place. I have learned from students wherever I have worked, but UMBC students, whether in Res Life or SGA, SEB, RSA, or Service Learning, they have inspired me the most. Hard work and determination.

As for the patience aspect…time for a real-life experience story. The most memorable thing I've learned at UMBC so far is that staff are truly passionate about serving and supporting our students.